Tom Roper's Weblog

Goodwood: Totesport Mile

So far my selections have not been a complete disgrace. Let's see how these do

210: Warringah
245: Filligree
325: Spectait
400: Rakaan
510: Peny's Gift  

The fourth and final day in the life of a library

The point of the librarydayinthelife exercise is supposed to be to attract people to this great profession of ours. I'm not sure today will do much towards that end. It consisted of:

• end of year financial procedures. We operate on a financial year roughly the same as the academic year. so the end of July requires much form-filling, invoice checking and the like. I discovered that my staffing budget for the new year has been set too low, and, with so many people are on holiday, there's no one around with the authority to correct it
• if that wasn't enough, I then spent about two hours with my management team working through timetables for the new academic year. We can cover all service points, but only just. If H1N1 flu strikes, heaven knows what will happen
• we cheered ourselves up with an agreeable Moroccan lunch at Doukan, and I spent the afternoon tying up loose ends and leaving notes. I start two weeks leave tomorrow.

So, children, become a librarian and if you're good, clever, and work hard for over thirty years in the profession, you may, if you're lucky, work up to a position where you get to shuffle lots of bits of paper.

Goodwood Cup day

I missed yesterday. Here's today's selections:

210 Roman Republic
245 Borderlescott
325 Friston Forest
400 Starfala

A third day in the life of a library

There's not much I can say about today, because I spent most if it interviewing, and, even if the candidates all consented, I do not think it proper to reveal any detail. If the candidates wish to blog or tweet it, as I sometimes have in my job search, that's fine. And I think it possible to say that the presentation tasks we set them, to give a short tutorial on using Wikipedia, produced excellent results, and I learnt something new from each one,

So the best I can offer you is a picture of my lunch, a masala dosa

A second day in the life of a library

For the second day of the working week, I was at our Tooting site, always a pleasure because of the fine Indian cafés for lunch (today I had a Sindhi biryani) and also because we have real users, as we deliver a service to the students on our summer school at the site.

I keep away from the users though, in case I frighten them. The management team pressed on with our tasks for the summer, and in a single day we:

• updated and revised the student induction presentations and scripts
• rewrote and redesigned the Learning Resource Centre leaflet, and cards giving opening hours and contact details
• prepared for interviews for the post of Electronic Resources Co-ordinator tomorrow. The interview packs had gone astray, so a very helpful member of Human Resources staff put together another one, and we devised some questions for the candidates
• on my own, I wrote a blog post for the CoFHE LASEC blog about the building projects debacle in British further education. Two parliamentary committees have now investigated it. These somewhat opaque initials need explanation: LASEC stands for London and South East Circle, of which I'm Chair, CoFHE for Colleges of Further and Higher Education, CILIP's special interest group for my sector.

All in all a good day's work. Less happily:

• I had a report back from our IT department saying that the reason external access to our catalogue had been disabled was because they'd put the catalogue server behind the firewall (I knew that). I composed some cogent arguments explaining why a library catalogue should not be hidden from the world. In the longer term, it seems to me to make little sense to host the catalogue ourselves. One of the puzzles of the further education sector is how little catalogue sharing and interoperability has been achieved
• I wasted a great deal of time trying to find a functioning printer.
• My attempts to use the interactive whiteboard foundered; the computer attached to it proclaimed itself out of virtual memory and collapsed on me every time I tried to use it

Goodwood

210 Lang Shining
245 Firebet
325 Ouqba
400 Monsieur Chevalier
I've been away from the turf for over a month, since Royal Ascot. Bookies tremble, I'm back

A day in the life of a library

The Library day-in-the-life project caught my eye, My entries will be atypical: I work in a London further education college and at this time of year we have hardly any students, and not many teaching staff. In any case, this summer is even more unusual, in that we close one of our centres and consolidate services on two sites, with a new Learning Resource Centre. We moved out of our old centres at the end of term and those of us who work through the summer have to use a hot desk room. And, finally, as Head of Learning Resources, i do little more than sit in an office thinking grand strategic thoughts.

Still, this is what happened today. I assembled with the Learning Resource Centre Managers in the hot desk room in the tower block, which is just as vile as it sounds, and, after a judicious period of e-mail checking, we spent the morning discussing how we would run orientation and induction sessions for staff when they return to a completely new working environment in September. I had an agreeable lunch at the Pantry, and then we returned to discuss a list of tasks that staff can perform on service points, a topic that spilled over into time-tabling, grading, line management responsibilities and the fundamental question, what is it that librarians do.

Then we went to inspect the new building. Rational discussion was difficult, because the alarm system was being tested, and a constant message sounded for over twenty minutes: "this is the incident control officer [there is no such person-TR]; the alarm has been activated. Please leave the building." Needless to say, we paid no attention. After work we went to the pub to mark the leaving of two colleagues, one of whom had worked for the college for twenty years

Man goes to festival shock

I went, for what I think must have been the tenth year, to the Tolpuddle Festival last weekend. The world is well served by blog posts in which middle-aged men recount the interesting things that happened at festivals, but here's my version:

I met Jean Bonnin, the author of A Certain Experience of the Impossilbe; I intend to read it forthwith
My Tom Paine t--shirt (advertising Tom Paine Ale, made by Harveys of Lewes, who, being brewers, are perhaps not tottaly in sympathy with the trade union movement: good beer, bad politics) attracted some comment
I held forth on a open mic session about school libraries and gave the Campaign for the Book a plug
I was the only man to correctly identified the original of a song played by Not Made in China: Police Car by Larry Wallis. An irrelevant fact: the Pink Fairies played at my school dance in what must have been 1971, but I think that was before Wallis joined them.

The fourth plinth

I thought I was too late, but as you can see, I'm not, so I've entered the draw for places on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in September. If I fail to win a place, I'll enter the draw for October.What will I do with my hour on the plinth? Wait and see. I may recite Greek bucolic poetry, while wearing running kit. I may grow a beard. But then again, I may not

JDCC09: sessions I tweeted

I'm fighting my way through the backlog of notes to write a final post on the JISC Digital Content Conference, wrapping up those sessions I haven't covered yet. The unreliable wifi at the conference means that while I managed live tweeting for some sessions, others exist as notes on the PowerBook. Given the very full coverage of the conference by the official conference bloggers, the slides, audio and video, and the aggregation at #JDCC09 I'm going to concentrate on my reactions to the sessions, rather than trying to give point-by-point accounts.

Plenaries

A Modest Proposal - A California Digital Library, Robert Miller, Director of Books at the Internet Archive: the memorable thing about Robert's presentation was probably his closing offer to digitise, gratis, ten books for any institution who wanted to try out the service. This sparked an idea for an after-conference dinner game: which ten books would you choose and why? I was impressed by the richness of the services hosted at the Archive: a biodiversity collection, a television archive of 27 channels, Yiddish literature online, early Korean printed books and NASA's collection of still and moving images.

Fostering knowledge: the JISC's contribution to the UK e-Infrastructure: Sarah Porter, JISC's head of innovation, amused us by comparing interoperability to a bourbon biscuit, while giving a cogent view of the way JISC will develop the networks now and in the future.

Content is king: but we are in a republic: Stuart Lee, in an entertaining presentation that included NSFW aardvarks, Star Trek, Ruskin's road-building and Alfred the Great urged us to tap the huge potential for community digitisation brought about by the mass ownership of digital cameras, something along the lines of a 21st century digital Mass Observation project

Parallel sessions:

Content in Education Strand - Supporting academic practice: embedding content in teaching, learning and research: people from the Reproduce project, hitherto unknown to me, presented on different aspects of their work. One issue raised was how to get people to use digital resources. One of the important lessons I learnt here was that the librarian's traditional approach of building subject pages or portals doesn't work for teachers, whose interests are far more fine-grained. JORUM is being relaunched as much more of a social area than a repository. We were also shown a site still under development which exploits the potential of NewsFilm Online, offering exemplars, practical examples and guidance

Looking Into The Future - Libraries of the future. With a new LRC opening in September, provided the furniture arrives in time, I was looking forward to this session. Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian introduced, and showed us the new Libraries of the Future video.

Then Les Watson, quick to emphasise he was not a librarian, took us through some possible futures, discussed some of the theory behind educational spaces and quoted Alain de Botton on the inhumanity and depressing atmosphere of a McDonalds in Westminster; Peter Godwin spoke about information literacy, but the Q&A was the most interesting part. A spirited discussion took place about the Saltire Centre, held up by some as the epitome of the new type of learning space, but denounced by a Glaswegian in the audience as 'not a library' and nothing more than 'an innovative use of an inner-city car-park' . Chris Batt asked us to consider if libraries didn't exist, would anyone now bother to invent them, though we had no real answer

Looking Into The Future - New technologies for delivering and accessing digital content. I found this session unsatisfactory. It was only at the end that we started to see something real when the very last speaker, Shelley Hales of the University of Bristol, showing a fascinating Second Life project, the Pompeiian house, a digital interactive representation of something itself a reconstruction, the Pompeian house built for the 1851 Great Exhibition and then housed in Crystal Palace until it burnt down. To get to Shelley we had to sit through an unnecessary Second Life for dummies presentation, and an ad man. Matthew of Shadowplay who, I'm afraid, added little, telling us for example, that 'the internet and digital media are transforming the landscape' or making unsupported assertions about iPhone ownership. Rather better was the first speaker, Dave Flanders, who spoke on form factor , format and agile prototyping, methods used in software development that were new to me